Archives

Tag: Love

Don’t hearts make the best pillows
Airsoft mattress lungs stable on a ribcage bed frame
The chest cresting waves to lull heads swimming with discontent and heaviness
Ear to hear the sea inside their body relaxed to receive your weight and anchor you in place for you’ve been drifting and
Don’t fingers make the best hair combs
Palmistry over porcelain and tracing maps around face lines
Intertwining fate lines and heart lines and hard times together
A promise to take what might be delivered and send it packing
Rucksack over its stooped shoulders and
Don’t eyes make the best mirrors
Stained glass over the entrance way to your body temple
Shrine to the Goddess as Aphrodite sings lullabies and
Isis sits the throne the ideal lover and mother and friend and
Recycling breath heart to heart beat and tangled feet and
Butterfly kisses and Eskimo noses and
Don’t hearts make the best pillows and
Don’t you wonder why you can’t sleep without it and
Bad dreams abound and tight chest from pounding and
Tears pool around you and wonder why you can’t be that for them and
Comfort was an arm draped carefully around you while you were sleeping and
Now nothing makes sense and an ache is trembling and travelling about you
A waste to start the end of nothing and be back in square one and
Say it’s safer here than losing my place again and
There’s nothing left on their end and you start breaking again and
There;s nothing left that was ever yours to begin and
Now there’s nothing left and
Your head lies on a pillow of things unsaid
Muffled screams into the bed and sheets wet cold sweat
Cold sweat cold sweat
Heavy handed hard hearted sweat
Don’t hearts make the best pillows?

Like this:

If you’ve been on your own for over a year
You’ll know what it’s like to fall in love
Every week with a different he or she
When it’s especially bad
It’s twice a week
Including faces on the TV and character descriptions in fiction
You hunt through for sex scenes and symbols to vicariously exist in
On the edges of madness
Stir crazy threatening mutiny
Your sanity and friends having deserted you
The only crew you have left are
Crew cut t-shirts and crew cut hair-styles
And you don’t really know what crew cut means
But the shirt fits
The hair is tidy
There’s no one to dress up for
The mirror agrees
You don’t like it when the mirror talks back though
You’d prefer another face to appear over your shoulder to straighten your collar
Leaving a lip graze on your necklace
You’ll constantly check over that shoulder waiting for a face to materialise
Waiting for somebody else to watch your back for you
Hello?
You’ll whisper and silence
I don’t know any more you’ll say
Tripping from craning your neck
To see your shoulder blades
Tight from slumping over the desk
You imagine writing letters
Romantic letters
Not just letters but words
Poetry
Time immortal
Immortal beloveds
Ink is not so precious now you’ll think
Because I only need to write
I
Not we nor us nor you nor ours
Postage is cheap
Supplies are scarcely needed
You fall in love twice a week with your TV
With an imaginary life-sized life
We will have two dogs
A paddock to lay picnics out
Under the willow
They’ll laugh and brush away leaves from your lap rustled from the tree
You feign to pull away mocking indignation at being mothered
Don’t smother me you’ll say
Then realise you’re sat inside your head eye delusions
Grandeur
Wanting to swallow poison
Bury your head inside of books in place of the oven
Drown in pages instead of the bathtub
Slash your expectations and decapitate the monster of self-fulfilment
To die for love is not romantic
Love is romantic
Life is lonely

Like this:

In my solitude should I be found wanting
Would you say that misery sits alone?
Accustomed to the habitual trading of skin
Grafted hand to cheek, to thigh
Tracing lines around the outer sides of faces
It’s grown tepid, the atmosphere scares
All memory of shared spaces
Chagrined smiles, pulling teeth
Evaporate in body heat
Held to feel the breeze caressed between
Your lungs do the same as mine
Let us share each exhalation

II.

Search to find that it exists on both sides
That tender ache for the interlocking islands of time
Melancholy brought you to a gentle acceptance of a life once known
Remembered with significant nostalgia
Photographs record a faceless exterior
Amongst raging kicks and the onslaught of images
Tired tired
Make amends though limited
Touch hands with severe militance
Afraid to brush lightly for fear of breaking
A kiss grazes the senses and leaves a mark
Of burnt out desires which warm still hearts
Lucky to catch fire with you

III.

A sea of letters, held by the adhesive muse
Holding the heart of a word smith in her lips
Planting gardens of novels in his heart
Many petalled page leaves across his skin
The inks all over him
Her fingers smudging edges
Penciling a sketch of his outline
A spoiled manuscript touched by many hands intertwining
Never to touch
It excites even when she is gone
Provides an outlet for song
A soft body to lean on
Let her hair fall around
Drowning doubts swimming through mouths
Adrift in a sea of sentenced nows
Weigh anchor
Announce a steady resting place amidst an onslaught of images
Frightening hallucinations and premonitions
Peaceful in arms
Her tenement of repair
When washed ashore she recovers the wreckage
Moored and forlorn
Fixed not forgotten
Blessed is the spoken mind traveling backwards through time
To collect scattered moments
Hello today, holy tomorrow, wholly together

Like this:

“It’s like, at this time of the night there isn’t as much interference. Other people’s thoughts and minds aren’t clogging up the air space. You know what I mean?”

We’d gotten into the habit of walking home together after work, talking for twenty minutes and finally getting somewhere. We would really be talking, then we’d reach her house.
I’d say goodbye, lingering that few extra seconds I knew she noticed, and wanted her to notice, but neither of us would ever acknowledge.
My house was still another forty-five minutes away, every other night I would catch the bus. Sunday was our day for walking.
I had that forty-five minutes to continue the conversation inside, mumble regrets, and imagine what the night could have become had I hugged her.
In my mind, our conversation flows through the evening. We’d manoeuvre the initial awkwardness and then speak freely.
I imagine it every night after we say goodbye.
It’s no matter, though. I don’t need company. Missing people isn’t a problem. It’s only when I want someone specific.
With her it was specific.

“I’ve always wanted to go see the ballet, but I’ve never had anyone to go with. I don’t really want to go by myself, you know? I’d like to go with a group of friends or something. But, no one will want to go.”
“I’ve always wanted to go, we should go, yea? We could ask Nyla as well. It would be fun, make a night of it. Dress up all fancy-like.”
“Really? That could be good.”

We never went to the ballet. I never bought it up again. We both knew that we wouldn’t go. It was one of those conversations you have to fill time. It’s like talking about what technology will be like in the future, we might never see it, but it fulfills something just to toy with the idea.
I should have asked her again. More regrets.
It could have played out like The Nutcracker, but instead I walked home with the combined sound of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, Schoenberg composing beside me, and Coltrane improvising during his free period.

“Hey, are you walking home tonight?”
“Oh. Yea, no. I’m sorry, I’m meeting somebody for a drink. Next week, we’re back on like normal”
“Ok. See you.”

She smiled when she said that. There was no walk the next week. Or the week after that. Or ever again.
I couldn’t take it. I quit. Working there was a reminder that at 4 am I would be lonely and unable to sleep.
They went to the ballet. Of course they went to the ballet. He asked her. Of course he asked her.
Evolution was at work. Not my evolution, though.

“Hey, long time. You’re looking well.”
“Yea, you too.”
“Hows things? You kind of just disappeared on us, huh?
“Yea. I needed it. A change.”
“That’s cool, I guess. Well, I’ll see you around then?”
“Yea, of course. See you.”

I didn’t see her again. Better said, I never let myself see her again. We passed on the street once, but she was with him, and so I tucked my chin into my chest and pretended to button my shirt cuff. I went to the ballet alone.